Over the Labor Day weekend, West Virginia’s Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) quietly implemented a new plan for feeding the thousands of people under its control. On Saturdays and Sundays, DCR would no longer serve three meals per day – as it has done for more than a decade. Instead, the more than 9,500 people behind bars in West Virginia received two meals each day.
In one prison facility, this meant a so-called “brunch” at 8:30 a.m. and a dinner at 3:30 p.m. – a gap of 17 hours between dinner and breakfast the next day.1
DCR’s own rules – still posted on its website – are clear: “Food service will prepare and serve three (3) meals during each twenty-four (24) hour period, with no more than fourteen (14) hours between the evening meal and breakfast.”
On August 25, the WVCBP made a Freedom of Information Act request for the new food menus and updates to this Food Services policy. As of September 4, DCR has yet to respond or make the requested information available on its website. But as WVCBP published this blog post, a news story reported that DCR decided to reverse course. According to DCR’s statement, the reduced meal service was a “test,” but DCR was “no longer pursuing this as an option.”
DCR’s “test” is proof that this is not just about the rules, which were not followed in this case and can be changed with a stroke of the DCR Commissioner’s pen. Nor is this just about the legal standards governing basic treatment of people in jails and prisons. This is endemic. The standards set by courts and lawmakers are so low that the mere experience of incarceration has been shown to cut years off one’s life.
This is about how we allow our state to harm its residents in service of out-of-state corporations motivated by profit.
In our 2023 report, The High Costs of Cheap Food, we showed how food behind bars has been harmful for years. It’s not merely unappetizing.
In 2022, former DCR employees submitted sworn affidavits acknowledging how jail residents were “regularly served spoiled milk for breakfast,” “given inadequate portions of food,” and “commonly given what appeared to be undercooked or rotten meat.” DCR meals are high in sodium, starches, and sugar, with fresh fruit and greens offered sparingly.
Incarcerated people already suffer disproportionately higher rates of chronic illness. Cheap, processed food exacerbates this struggle. A Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that people behind bars “suffer from higher rates of diabetes and heart disease than the general public, conditions caused or at minimum exacerbated by the typical prison diet.” Between 2003 and 2024, state spending on prison medical care has gone up $28.6 million – a 226.5 percent increase in two decades.
There may not be private prisons in West Virginia, but in an echo of the state’s history of extraction, the state has privatized most aspects of life behind bars: from phone calls to medical care to nutrition. Each year, West Virginia sends millions of dollars to out-of-state companies who have bid to provide these essential services at the lowest cost to the state. The vendor responsible for providing jail and prison meals is Pennsylvania-based Aramark Correctional Services.
The multi-billion-dollar company operates in hundreds of jails and prisons despite years of scandal: stale and moldy food in New Jersey prisons; food shortages in Ohio; a Colorado jail that served food containing the metal shavings of a broken kitchen machine; and the state of Michigan imposing thousands of dollars in fines for food shortages, unauthorized menu substitutions, and sanitation violations.
This is not unique to Aramark. For-profit meal service in jails and prisons has produced bad food – and less of it.
A New Jersey Aramark worker explained: “The portions we were required to serve were really small. You could eat six portions like the ones we served… and still be hungry. If we put more than the required portion on the tray the Aramark people would make us take it off.”
People survive by turning to commissary – a modern-day company store that sells food and other necessities at artificially high prices. With West Virginia prison jobs paying less than $1.50 an hour, the financial burden falls on loved ones outside of prison. One woman in prison told us she spent 75 percent of the money her family sent her on commissary food.2
In 2022, DCR signed a five-year contract with Union Supply Group (USG) to provide commissary services. That same year, Aramark acquired USG.
When Aramark sacrifices quality in the dining hall, it makes higher profits. When incarcerated people supplement insufficient meals at the commissary, Aramark makes higher profits. A few months after the acquisition, Aramark announced “the highest annual revenue” in the company’s history.
And the profiteering does not end there. For each commissary sale, USG pays DCR a commission. DCR gets a 10 percent kick-back for adult prison sales, and 20 percent for sales made in jails or juvenile facilities. When USG makes money selling items that DCR does not provide, DCR also makes money.
Put simply, DCR has a direct financial incentive to leave residents underserved.
Restoring thousands of weekend meals is merely the first step. DCR should issue an immediate public guarantee that the decision to serve two meals a day will be permanently reversed. They must also make more and healthier food available by ending race-to-the-bottom privatization in its facilities.
And if the new DCR Commissioner, David Kelly, wants to save money on food, we have a real solution: reduce the number of people incarcerated in West Virginia.
